In my opinion Draw Things is the best stable diffusion app currently available for macOS/iOS. It's free, it is available in the App Store, it manages downloading models and weights, it supports a wide selection of popular models as well as custom weights, and it supports inpainting, text2image, and image2image.
It has some oddities: it uses a sqlite database to store generated images rather than the more traditional files, and the UI is idiosyncratic. You have to follow the author's twitter feed to learn how to use the advanced features.
The verdict: storing blobs in the database is totally fine. Stable diffusion is totally compute bound, the overhead of storing a 1mb file in a sqlite db is miniscule.
That article also points to the paper https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/to-blob..., the images produced by stable diffusion are about 500-600Kb in size. At this point it could be a similar performance or could be a little better or a little worse. I am not saying that it is better to store files in SQLite, just saying that nothing wrong with it, if those files are below 1Mb.
> I am not saying that it is better to store files in SQLite, just saying that nothing wrong with it, if those files are below 1Mb.
There is one very obvious thing wrong with it, the fact that those resulting images aren't files that are easily accessible to other things.
Unless storing in SQLite actually offers a real advantage in some other way, it's a disadvantage when the output is something you'll want to use with other tools.
Draw Things is only for iOS. You can try to run it on a Mac, but it crashes for me.
Also CoreML on a Mac seems to require macOS 13, which is reportedly buggy. I was going to update and changed my mind after reading people's experiences online. :(
As far as I can tell, the advantages of Gauss are that it runs Apple's more efficient ml-stable-diffusion engine, and that the GUI is better. The disadvantage is that you (currently) have to build it yourself in a multi-step compiling process that involves "goo".
I appreciate the user-focus move of displaying the CFG as a slider, but its a fine-grained value. That makes the app unable to replicate a specific render shared online. I suppose this is a tradeoff :) I just wish there was a common UI element that combined a slider and value display...
Also, would be nice to share some binaries on GitHub!
For anyone interested (and using an M1/M2 Mac), whilst Amazing AI offers limited twiddling (just the step count and seed) it is native Apple Silicon, comparatively light on resources, and on my base model 2021 Air (8GB RAM, 7 GPU) it produces a 2048x2048 pixel 100 iteration image in under 5 minutes.
I know that headline number is slow compared to machines with beefy specs, but remember that this is 100 iterations on the lowest power M1 you can get, with 16 times the pixel count of the online 512x512 ones. And even with 40 iterations you can generate some stunning images with the right prompts.
Draw Things has a massive amount of configuration, is equally fast (it's also native) and can do a variety of output sizes.
Haven't noticed anything, but TBH I also haven't looked as I've had no need to question things - the rest of the OS runs fine alongside, with dozens of browser tabs, plus both Amazing AI and Draw Things running (though only one actually generating at once). And with about 50 iterations I'm losing around 1% battery every couple of images so it doesn't seem particularly taxing, whilst running cold.
Edit: It isn't obvious with Amazing AI but it may in fact be doing what Draw Things makes explicit in the options, which is generate at 512x512 and use your choice of upscaler to get to 2048x2048.
Does this have any sort of ability to feed it training data? I know I can do that with some SD frontends on Windows - ex: give it 5 pictures of my face, and have it generate a 3D avatar of me.
I doubt it, but even if it did you probably don't want to be re-training the set on your mac. There is plenty of instructions on how to train your face into the dataset using AWS. IIRC it costs around $20 of compute time.
If you are on linux, you can do it with 8gb I hear. I have the 3060 8gb and had issues on win10, so I can train on google colab using the TheLastBen fast-dreambooth for free.
Cannot find the info of what mac, especially for this wave of ai. One did mention in the comment of air but that is so far I can get hold of.
I only have a m1 mini in lieu of my developer unit and it is out of the country even. I tried to get back in but at least one app required 32gb to build, which stopped my 2023 jan plan of getting a MacBook Air 24gb. A Mac mini studio seems the minimum.
Anyone has a low end mac which feel the pain of being in the low end. Or must I get a studio mini.
Not exactly everyone. I will continue to pay artists for their art. Once the AI will train mostly on derivative works produced by itself, with most artists whose work was used without asking to originally train the AI out of business, it will be very fun. Those who will be able to use all that stuff as a new kind of raw material to create pristine art will be a tiny minority, and it will really be a new chapter in the art book. For everybody else, the marvellous AI will be in the hands of the lords of social media, producing an infinite stream of uninsteresting stuff you love watching while scrolling the infinitely long page depicting the sterile desert we contributed to create teaching the machine what we like and what we don't. Very fun, indeed. An AI generated mirror of our mediocrity, with no way out. And please, don't start telling me that our brains work the same and that every piece of art is derivative work. Human beings are a little bit more complex than a neural network.
Hm, new chapter sure. What about the aesthetics? 20th century art (architecture primarily, but also paintings, etc.) expresses feelings mostly because with the advent of tech (photography, etc.). I get that there was no need to improve upon what we had in terms of sculptures (Greek-Roman, etc.)s and artists nowadays are all about originality... But modern art is ugly AF compared to past centuries. Poor aesthetics are everywhere, from the way we dress, to the way we build... Even when budget is a non-issue.
Take any 8th-BC-to-17th-AD art-form and compare it to a modern counter-part and you'll see what I mean. I feel that most 20th century art-form won't survive the next 200 years for good reason.
That’s why copyright exists, so that more people create art for a living. You can be against copyright, but it’s certainly something that the law concerns itself with.
If this is the case then almost all art is stolen art because it is inspired by previous art. Maybe it is time to rethink the notion that ideas can be owned or stolen.
AI art is, in my opinion, an accessory to thievery, and only if the dataset and model that produced it was trained on copyrighted work. I would've preferred if they had had a sign-up/opt-in phase, or just using open license and public domain pictures. But the damage has been done and they sure as hell aren't going to revert any of the changes.
I think this got shared on hackernews too early for this to be ready, the author says somewhere else that packaging and publishing to app store is in the pipeline if I recall right.
Does SwiftUI really count as native on the Mac? My experience is that Apple has not invested enough for that to be true. Apple is Apple, so when they say jump, developers jump. But if any other company tried pulling what they’re pulling with SwiftUI, they’d be getting a swift kick in the behind by their dev community. It feels like their UWP moment; nice idea, bad execution.
This isn’t to criticize the project; I like and want to see more native Mac software, I just feel very disappointed with Apple’s leadership in this area. A native Mac app should almost automatically be without a doubt better than the Electron version, but at least with SwiftUI that isn’t happening.
Regardless, inconsistencies between AppKit on Mac and SwiftUI on Mac are enough to make it not native, IMO.
Kudos to the author for taking advantage of CoreML, one of the areas where native software shines on Apple platforms.
iOS 16.0 included 226 SwiftUI apps. Several highly promoted features (such as complications on the Lock Screen and widgets) are now only possible using SwiftUI.
Some new SwiftUI only frameworks (like Swift Charts) developed directly from internal Apple teams creating new SwiftUI apps, and factoring out useful components.
> Regardless, inconsistencies between AppKit on Mac and SwiftUI on Mac are enough to make it not native, IMO.
SwiftUI is not a wrapper around AppKit controls, although that is/was how some SwiftUI views are authored. Likewise, some recently added AppKit controls are actually wrapped SwiftUI views.
There is an ongoing effort to unify macOS and iPadOS which became much more noticeable at the UX level in macOS 11. It is unfortunately difficult to determine which inconsistencies are deficiencies in SwiftUI and which are the "legacy" behavior of AppKit.
Since SwiftUI is a system framework, we only see its evolution in spurts on an annual schedule.
That statement applies equally to any web-based framework, any native framework, Java, appkit, UWP, Silverlight…
Apple could have invested in SwiftUI on Mac to the same extent they did on iOS, and things would look very different.
SwiftUI as currently implemented on Mac breaks enough platform conventions and is, relative to existing native UI, slow and buggy enough to IMO not more native than any other cross platform UI solution.
> That statement applies equally to any web-based framework, any native framework, Java, appkit, UWP, Silverlight…
Except for the part where Apple doesn't hype and then quickly abandon developer APIs the way some other companies do. AppKit, for instance, has been continually iterated on for three decades now.
Since Apple has been very clear that SwiftUI is "where the puck is going", I doubt it will be abandoned as quickly as Google or Microsoft's "future of platform development strategy" of the month.
Which UI conventions are broken? SwiftUI mostly uses the standard AppKit widgets, then it's up to the developer to use it or to customise everything and make a monster out of it.
The main "issue" is that it's much easier to customise things in SwiftUI.
UWP failed and continues to fail because Microsoft themselves are not invested into it.
Most of the apps that come out of Microsoft use something else. Eg: Vscode, Teams etc, Office etc.
It’s not the case with Apple at least from what I can see publicly. Not an Apple fanboy by any stretch.
But I’ve been burned by Microsoft when they introduced Silverlight as the platform for developing Windows Phone 7 apps. Only to deprecate it in Windows Phone 8. A lot of developers were not happy at that time.
M1 Mac owners should also check out the iPad version of Draw Things, which has a large number of features and is in very active development:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/draw-things-ai-generation/id64...
Be aware that there is a bug in macOS 13.2b1 that makes Draw Things unusable on that version of macOS. Hopefully Apple will fix that soon.